China’s President has delivered a blow to the cryptocurrency community, after condemning the digital currency on Chinese TV.

Speaking on CCTV1 – an official channel of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – Xi Jinping criticised cryptocurrencies as unregistered securities, financial fraud, and illegal Ponzi schemes.

Dovey Wan, co-founder of crypto investment holding firm Primitive Ventures, translated the key tenets of Jinping’s speech in a tweet on Monday (November 18, 2019).

Jinping’s announcement will come as bad news to crypto fans, who gave him the moniker “crypto dad” when he described blockchain technology as an “important breakthrough”, and promised to accelerate its development throughout China.

As a result of those comments, the price of bitcoin rose by a massive 42 per cent, which was its largest gain since may 2011 and the fourth largest ever.

The president’s latest comments are a reminder that while he is a fan of distributed ledger technology, he does not support crypto currency, which was banned in China in 2017. Global crypto giants Binance and Tron are banned from the popular Chinese social media platform Weibo.

However, despite calling cryptocurrency a criminal activity, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) is reportedly working the world’s first national digital currency.

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The China Centre for International Economic Exchanges, Huang Qifan, stated national governments and central banks should issue digital currencies and control the emerging digital monetary system.

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